How much optimization is too much optimization

There is that one night in everyone's life which follows a pattern:-

• It happens on a pre-weekend day, Friday or Saturday

• You can't sleep

• It's 223 AM

• An itch which says you are not at your full potential

• The class test you had on Wednesday, which everyone said was easy, but it went subpar

• for you

There is no doubt that the first year of college is very competitive. Everyone is trapped in a

cycle of improving grades, their body, and their social circle. It pressures us to be the "best

version of ourselves". The problem is that you become trapped in this cage of self-deficient

and sub-optimal. You form an exaggerated lens of the world. But thankfully (?) you don't need to think on your own to solve your own problems. A simple prompt in a particular web

application gives you a custom-tailored health schedule, diet plan, a guide on communication and even solves your assignments and tests for you. We won't take the name, but you get the idea. In fact, another popular set of web based applications can send your stuff required for diet plan without requiring you step outside your room (totally doesn't negate the purpose of the workout plan you had made /s) and takes a small amount of 100 Rs over the MRP from your pocket (and you totally won't realize by the middle of the month that you have exhausted your monthly allowance /s).

You must realize how much autonomy has been taken from our lives with the influx of

technology used in day-to-day life, like gen AI and quick delivery applications. Working

people are expected to finish work on files and reports when they are outside working hours

due to the digitalization of the workforce and optimized means of drafting reports using gen

AI. Students have started using more and more of gen AI to not only draft complete

assignments but also club applications, completely defeating the purpose of learning and

showcasing a personal perspective. The price of convenience comes at the cost of autonomy and identity.

On the social side of things, people use gen AI for projecting an optimized and fake version of themselves. We have completely given up making decisions for ourselves, asking gen AI to make decisions and analyze their relationships, important life actions, and interestingly, some people have come up with AI dating personas . We also have picked up some bad habits, such as texting people when we are at their door instead of ringing the doorbell, constantly checking phones mid-conversations, hesitancy to talk face to face or at least on video calls rather than texting people (pity those who have important arguments on texts rather than a voice call at least).

The most important thing is the fact that most of us have become victims of learned

helplessness. It's a sad condition where a person just gives up on trying after facing a

problem and just exists. In our case, it's our over-reliance on tech. When everything is readily available to us, assignment answers on our fingertips, groceries within 10 minutes, digital companionship which is available 24x7, we lose our capacity to think. In fact, it's scientifically proven that overuse of such technology does lead to a decrease in cognitive ability. The cycle is clear: we are taught to be helpless by a culture of convenience, and when real, un-optimizable challenges arise, we feel powerless to overcome them.

With this, I would like to invite the reader to take up a challenge with me. For 7 days, delete every Gen AI, quick delivery, food delivery and online shopping app from your phone. Go to

your local grocery shop and purchase using cash, not UPI. Approach interpersonal problems with human contact, rather than chat and conversation analysis by an LLM model, which specializes in prediction rather than reasoning and gaslights you based on your prompt.

There was an inherent value in the human experience, before the rise of over dependence on such technology. It was optimized and messy for sure, but through our own struggles, we learnt something worth remembering. Life by design is never good enough, but you can make it enjoyable by using your autonomy and identity and voluntarily going through small daily struggles, which makes it worth living.